Wish List: What Should HP’s Cloud Look Like?

HP cloud chief Zorawar “Biri” Singh revealed to Wired Enterprise late last year that the company’s forthcoming cloud will run VMware’s open-source Cloud Foundry running atop OpenStack — and not Windows Azure, at least to start with.

And there were rumblings again last week at the NY Times’ Bits blog, with Singh offering an idea on pricing, saying, “We won’t pull [Amazon’s] customers out by the horns, but we already have customers in beta who see us as a great alternative.” He did not tell Bits an exact cost, but said, “We are not coming at this at ‘8 cents a virtual computing hour, going to 5 cents.'”

Now Wired Enterprise hears that HP’s cloud will be launched in early April, bringing it to the fore again.

But regardless of what’s under the hood, Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers have momentum and are positioned well in the market for services. So what should HP’s public cloud look like if it’s to be a big player?

Before Singh’s arrival, the rumor was that HP was building a “public cloud” based on proprietary technology developed at HP Labs. But little more than four months later, Singh and his crew unveiled a “beta” cloud service to a small group of testers, and it was based on OpenStack, an open source platform founded by NASA and Rackspace.

This about-face showed not only that HP is determined to compete with the Amazons of the world, but that it may actually be nimble enough — and open minded enough — to do so. With its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and other web services, Amazon pioneered the art of delivering infrastructure resources over the net, including virtual servers and storage. With OpenStack, HP aims to mimic Amazon Web Services, but in a way that plays nicely with other clouds. OpenStack can be run anywhere, by anyone.

Now, Singh and company have reaffirmed their approach with Cloud Foundry, a platform that lets developers build and host applications online without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. On HP’s beta service, Cloud Foundry runs atop OpenStack.

Singh tells Wired Enterprise that HP is building a public cloud, but in using OpenStack, it wants to create a service that dovetails with private clouds set up behind the firewall. “We want to provide hybrid clouds,” Singh said, referring to services that span the public and private. “As HP, we have to be able to connect the dots there.”

Metz writes: “Yes, HP is a bit late to the public cloud party — even Dell has launched its own public service — and much of the HP pitch is still mere theory. After all, this is a beta service. But when you talk with Biri Singh, you get the feeling that HP’s cloud is in good hands.”

Share your cloud wish list, thoughts

Are you a public cloud customer now? What would you like to see coming from cloud providers, and specifically, what would you like to see in HP’s forthcoming “hybrid,” open-source cloud? Share your wish list items, as well as thoughts on how HP might be positioned well/or not to fill gaps in the market.